ABSTRACT
The trustees responsible for the street, however, refused to relax the restrictions on the feus and it is precisely this stubbornness that has given us the grand street we have today. By the mid 1820s the economy had recovered and building finally started in earnest. The original idea was that Union Street would be residential, a civilised extension of the crowded old city where its merchants could set up home. However so successful was the street in linking four of the city’s five turnpike roads that it was thronged with traffic and people as soon as it opened. The city’s aspirant retailers soon saw the potential and abandoned their cramped premises in the old shopping streets of Gallowgate and Broad Street for the grander premises that eventually started going up along Union Street. The city’s professional classes, solicitors, architects and insurance companies populated the piano nobile, the grand first floors, of the classical buildings while artists and music teachers, hotels and even schools were to be found on the upper floors. But this wasn’t all; Union Street was built on a viaduct so that there were floors below the ground floor fronting onto the lower-level streets of the old town. These were full of small manufacturers and tailors completing the mix and creating an entire multi-level city in the crosssection of the street. In the 2008 update of her book The Granite Mile, Diane Morgan is scathing about the recent history of Union Street. She is saddened by the loss of the trams and the cinemas, the relocation of the universities to out-of-town sites and the undermining of the retailing by the St Nicholas and Bon Accord shopping centres. She worries about its ‘clone town’ shops and the concentration of late-night drunkards at its western end. She concludes rather enigmatically that: ‘It is time that it was run by ladies in hats provided of course that they are as formidable as they are charming... have a love of real shopping, are au fait with the inner workings of the rag trade and are not inclined to be overwhelmed by aspiring developers.’ Ms. Morgan clearly has a particular view of how the street should be run and I’m sure we would all agree with her wish to ban window dressings consisting of nothing but posters about mortgages and interest rates on loans. She also disagrees with the recent pedestrianisation undertaken by the council at the eastern end of the street. However this, together with better policing of the evening economy, improved management and wider pavements in the sections where traffic remains, is having an impact. The trials and tribulations of the city fathers 200 years ago have bequeathed us a street that is as grand an urban set-piece as anywhere in Europe. Over time it will and must evolve but its granite stones will endure.
